Five billion names — at the click of a mouse

PROVO — After nearly a decade of research, more than 5 billion searchable names are now available at the click of a mouse, thanks to a Provo-based company's efforts to digitize the U.S. Census.

Officials at Ancestry.com say the company's site has become the only source where all publicly released census information from 1790 to 1930 can be found and searched online.

"A few years ago, the idea that the census would be digitized and indexed online seemed outside the realm of possibility," Ruth Carr of the Department of History and Genealogy at the New York Public Library said in a statement. "Researchers previously had to work thousands of reels of microfilm in order to find a specific person or family they wanted to learn about."

With an estimated 73 percent of the population actively researching or showing interest in family history, according to the company, genealogy is one of the fastest-growing online industries.

Ancestry.com says it makes family-history research simple by showing customers resources that help complete family records.

On the site, the company points its customers — the firm says it has more than 725,000 paid subscribers — to an array of archives, including photographs and birth, marriage, death, military and immigration records.

"It's a powerful mission and much is yet to be done," said Tim Sullivan, chief executive officer of Ancestry.com. "You can't do this kind of research on your own."

Since 1997, the Web site has aimed to make genealogy research faster.

Sullivan said it is among the world's largest collection of historical records.

In 1790, under the direction of then- U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, the first U.S. Census took place. Census enumerators went door-to-door to take the census information that can now be accessed online.

Original documents were handwritten, and the National Archive and Record Administration put the paper on microfilm.

Ancestry.com digitized the documents to make them available to view from a personal computer — a task that took a combined 6.6 million hours of labor.

According to the company's analysts, it would take an estimated 3,144 years for one person to replicate the U.S. Census collection.

If printed pages of the documents were placed end-to-end, the company says, the paper would run the distance of New York to Los Angeles .

"The images of the handwritten documents breathe life into the stories," Sullivan said. "It gives a sense of real-life to see occupations, cost of homes and birth places of ancestors."